(Liz: I once saw Katie Noonan doing her groceries in the Brisbane CBD, and I wanted to tell her how much I love her music, but I didn’t want to interrupt her while she looked at frozen peas, so I just flailed silently at my companion. GOOD TIMES.)

Okay new series here at No Award: Once a month (or so) we’re going to review short stories written by non-white SFF authors. Short stories because they’re easier to fit into our schedules, and also we’ll make sure they’re accessible online so you can read them.

Quokkas, I really enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale. Both book and (2017) adaptation. (The ’80s movie is streaming on Stan – do we need a liveblog? Maybe we need a liveblog. But we’ll also need wine. I mean, I’ll need wine.)

One of the things I enjoyed is that, like a lot of Canadian science fiction — sorry, Margaret Atwood, speculative fiction — it leaves space in its worldbuilding for the rest of the world to exist. Even within the narrow confines of book!Offred’s perspective, we know that Japanese tourism and gender relations maintain the current status quo, or something close to it, and the wider perspective of the Hulu series gives us glimpses of Canada and Mexico.

Sometimes I wonder what that kind of extreme patriarchal dystopia would look like in Australia, given that we were colonised by Georgians and Victorians instead of Puritans.

And other times I wonder, well, while the USA has collapsed and Gilead has formed out of its ashes, what’s happening back home?